Making Change

I am back in my "Home and Native Land" (lyrics from "O Canada").  I now have a British Columbia drivers license, BC plates on my ol' Subaru, BC insurance, and as of today I have BC Medical. Dear Deborah, my American wife is still jumping through the hoops they provide for anyone born outside Canada. But, we are getting there. 


Last time we thought we were getting too comfortable and boring, we moved to West Africa for a year. This is a far cry from Togo, but the effort involved in the change was/is no less  all consuming. 


My dad bought this little lot on the Sushine Coast back in the 70's. It's just a brief ferry boat ride north of Vancouver.  He pulled a little trailer on it and he and mom had a great little summer spot 2 blocks from the water on a dead end street. Deb and I brought our kids and camped out with them as a regular part of our summers for many years. He passed it on to me in 2002. We tried to imagine what we could afford to put on the property as the land values increased year after year, and the older summer places were replaced with new home$. 


Our neighbor, Monica from the B&B style place next door emailed me with news that there was a cottage a few blocks away that the owners were looking to demolish or give away. Deborah and I came up and had it checked out by an engineer who said,"you can't buy lumber like that any more" . So we had the 1958, eight hundred square foot cottage cut in two and hauled the 6 blocks to our lot. The house was free. Everything after that was/is not. 


Mark orchestrated the addition of many truck loads of "pit run" gravel and cut the trees and hedge to accomodate a 14 foot wide house section,. He oversaw the entire septic system, did the survey and dug the three 70 foot trenches for the drain field and moved tons of dirt with a rented back hoe that broke down and threw treads in the mud. Later, when we couldn't find a machine for rent anywhere on the coast, Mark stood feet away from the driver we were forced to hire for the water and electric trenching. The ditches ran from the road to the dwelling, about 100 feet. It was pissing rain and Mark was jumping in and out of that 4 foot ditch with a shovel in hand, all the while joking and yukking it up with the operator and keeping him honest. and on task. On one of our more recent trips up here, he designed and built (I got to be the helper) our front porch, a really nice little mini-deck.


Will, the engineer reccommended a friend of his who was capable of a wide variety of construction skills. Mark had his own tree service business to deal with in the US, and since I am not capable of a wide variety of construction skills, we hired Chris. Thank God! That kid, pretty much single-handedly demo'd and salvaged the shack on the home's site, , alligned the 2 sections, created concrete piers for foundation, filled the 5 foot gap we intentionally left for more floor space. He laid the sub floor, filled in the wall spaces, added the extra roof area, did the gutters, board and bat siding, windows, plumbing, got the electric working, built a small space under the house for the water heater, dug and set the French drains, and lots more, but then he dissapeared without a trace.